The Kurds' worst ally in the world: The United States

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The Kurds are a large group of people. The Middle East was divided by the west a century ago ignoring the divisions of groups of people, to combine rivals and split groups. The Kurds are a large majority in Iraq and Turkey, where they have fought for independence against each.

As the BBC says, "Between 25 and 35 million Kurds inhabit a mountainous region straddling the borders ofTurkey,Iraq, Syria,Iranand Armenia. They make up the fourth-largest ethnic group in the Middle East, but they have never obtained a permanent nation state."

Remember when the US invaded Iraq, how the Kurds were portrayed as the most pro-US group, the most welcoming of the US liberating the country. They are a group for democracy in a region without much of it.

Remember before that in the first US war on Iraq how the US president made a spontaneous message to the Kurds that it was time for them to rise up and overthrow Saddam, implying US support for them to do so, and they listened and fought - and then the president appeared to get advice we were better off with Saddam and he left them hanging to be slaughtered by Saddam.

Betrayed by their 'ally' the US.

For a long time, the US has wanted things from Turkey, and so has supported Turkey's oppression of the Kurds, their interests and freedom being trashed for US benefit.

Now, the US is doing it again. After rallying the Kurds to resist the oppression of Assad for years, trump spontaneously did the bidding of Turkey and Putin and announced the US withdrawal from Syria, which the Kurds say is a betrayal and a disaster for them.

The Washington Post:

"This time, the United States is betraying more than just the Kurds, allies say

BEIRUT — Residents of northeastern Syria were bracing Thursday for the fallout of President Trump’s unexpected move to withdraw U.S. troops, a decision that many in the region regard as a betrayal that will reverberate well beyond this corner of Syria.

With Turkey threatening to invade from the north, the Syrian government threatening to retake the area by force and the Islamic State regrouping in their midst, Kurds and Arabs were unsure — and divided — over what most to fear next.

In the Syrian town of Kobane, where the United States’ alliance with Syria’s Kurds began in 2014, thousands of Kurds marched in anger and dismay toward a U.S. military base, many clutching photographs of their children killed fighting the Islamic State alongside U.S. forces. They urged Trump to reverse his decision.

“She died beside Americans, and now that you are leaving, I will also die,” shouted a mother holding up the photograph of her dead daughter, who had served in a women’s unit of the main Kurdish militia, according to witnesses.

The decision represented yet another setback to Kurdish aspirations for some form of statehood, which have repeatedly met disappointment at the hands of the United States. The letdowns began after President Woodrow Wilson pushed for but failed to secure a separate Kurdish state at the 1919 peace conference following World War I, which drew the borders of the modern Middle East.

Kurds say the hopes they have since placed in the United States have continued to be dashed. In 1975, the United States abandoned support for a Kurdish uprising in Iraq after President Saddam Hussein struck a deal with their ally, the Shah of Iran. In 1991, President George H.W. Bush encouraged Iraqis to rise up against Saddam, but when Kurds in the north and Shiite Arabs in the south responded to the call, the U.S. military refrained from going to their aid. Most recently, the Trump administration last year withheld support for an independence referendum in Iraqi Kurdistan, and Iraqi troops rolled unopposed into areas the Kurds had controlled...

This latest betrayal has ramifications far beyond the aspirations of Kurds, said Hoshyar Zebari, the Kurdish former foreign minister of Iraq.

“This sudden change in policy is worrying not only to Syrian Kurds but to all the U.S. allies in the region,” he said. “The message it sends is that there really is a question of trust. This will cause many governments to rethink their alliances with a superpower that can really can just abandon them and leave them in the lurch and throw them under the bus.”

Russia, Turkey and Iran will be the biggest beneficiaries, he said. “These are the new powers in the Middle East. Why should we oppose them? Why should we antagonize them?” he asked.

Kurds living in predominantly Kurdish towns and villages strung out along the northern Syrian border said their biggest concern was the continuing threat of a Turkish incursion.

The prospect of Turkish invasion may have played a part in prompting Trump’s move to withdraw troops. Trump announced the decision after speaking on the telephone Friday with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has long been hostile to American support for the new Kurdish entity emerging along Turkey’s border...

Turkish officials reiterated their threat Thursday. “They can dig tunnels or ditches if they want. They can go underground if they want. When the time and place come, they will be buried in their ditches,” Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar was quoted as saying by Turkey’s official Anadolu news agency, during a visit to Qatar."

So, the dictator of Turkey, where trump has business interests, tells trump what he wants against the Kurds, and trump gives it to him, screwing the Kurds again, to allow the dictator to go murder them, betraying years of US support.

On trump's conflict of interests, an article titled "Trump’s Conflicts of Interest in Turkey", "Selling out America’s interests on the battlefield".

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We have a system in which a new president takes over every 4 to 8 years. And with each new president comes the possibility of foreign policy changes which betray some groups and help others. The only way we could maintain a consistent foreign policy is with a dictator, which would, of course, be unacceptable, for a host of other reasons. If we truly desire to stop betraying peoples, we should get out of the military intervention business.

Moreover: Trump may have announced US military withdrawal from Syria, but is he lying again? There is every reason for a Trump lie to appease Putin and Erdogan. (Not that he needs a reason). In the next breath Trump said "we" would be "coming out" just after "taking back" all of the land. The United States never owned Syria, and so cannot actually take it back, and also must not take it at all. Such an action would be immoral, illegal and totally unacceptable.

For a small fraction of the cost of continuing the war making, the United States should instead provide massivehumanitarian aid and assistance.

Withdrawal from Syria should be be followed by the similar withdrawal of the U.S. military from Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya. Moreover, the United States must withdraw its hundreds of thousands of military personnel stationed on 800 to 1,000 bases in countries around the world.

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The Syrian civil war has been going on for so long the world seems to have forgotten all the suffering that has happened and continues to go on. Assad has been bombing and using chemical weapons on innocent civilian communities since its inception, he's an absolute war criminal if ever there was one. Since 2011 half a million Syrians killed, more than a million injured, with over 12 million refugees. Then you have ISIS/ISIL who at one time claimed large swaths of land in both Syria and Norther Iraq while they performed ethnic cleansing and expanded with funding I'm guessing mostly from the Saudi's and what ever properties they extracted from their pillaging, plus their propaganda campaigns from places like France, the UK and even in the US and Canada.

That the world can not come together to stop this is in itself a monumental failure. And yes, the Kurdish fighters deserve much of the credit for beating ISIS back. The US was there with a small number of troops on the ground delivering support. The Kurd's have proved to be a tremendous asset for the US and Iraq and Syrian civilians. If there is a bright spot in all this failure

it has been the Kurdish fighters.

I just hope the US doesn't pull out overnight and leave them due to Trump's lunacy...

War sucks, even the US air campaign in Syria has killed Syrian civilians as well as Kurdish fighters. But it has also provide much more assistance in the war against ISIS. What we need is more diplomacy / the missing key to peace which has thus far been an utter failure. The Paris attacks/ wanton terrorism etc... along with the refugee levels are truly an existential threat to the world at large.